An effective customer acquisition strategy involves creating brand awareness, reaching out to target audiences, capturing their interest, engaging and listening to them, and motivating them to make a purchase. Although marketers keep are continually innovating their customer acquisition tactics, social media has changed the customer acquisition game altogether. Let’s find out how.
Social media has long been a game-changer for marketing for almost all businesses. This includes creating enticing customer experiences, innovative advertising, brand promotions, roping in influencers, customer acquisition and much more.
Your target audience includes active social media users, no matter which demographics they belong to. Here are a few statistics from Statista about the growth of social networks
- 2.8 billion users used social networks in 2017.
- The US had 243.6 million social network users in 2018.
- By 2023, the US is expected to have 257.4 million active users.
Smart Insights also reports some interesting insights:
- Facebook offers a vast ‘reach’ potential for organic and paid opportunities.
- Facebook enjoys a 70% share of time US users are active on social networks and Instagram takes the second spot.
- 73% of Americans use YouTube.
- YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat are the most popular social platforms among US teens.
Looking at these stats, it is clear that social media offers a much wider reach to your target audience hence making it a significant element of your customer acquisition strategy.
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How Can Social Media Lead Your Customer Acquisition Strategy?
Here are seven reasons social media can lead your customer acquisition strategy:
1. Scale and Reach
The first step in the journey from being a user to becoming a customer is getting to know the brand. Social media can help you do that with organic and paid campaigns. Although posting quality content at the right frequency is key to improving brand awareness, social media can help you scale your efforts to a wide user base. In comparison to other channels, social media offers greater reach to your target audiences.
2. Targeting and Segmentation
Finding the right target audience or potential customers for your company is a crucial element of a successful customer acquisition strategy. While most users are active on popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube; Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, etc., each has its niche audiences. Researching to understand your target users’ favorite platforms and the time of the day they spend on each platform can help you focus your customer efforts better.
Also, social media users actively join groups based on their interests or use hashtags to stay in touch with their favorite trends, which means you already have a segmented audience based on preferences and demographics. Use it optimally.
3. Listen and Engage
Listening to the voice of your customers and prospects helps you gauge audience sentiment and make informed decisions for your customer acquisition strategy. You can monitor audience discussions on your posts, use sentiment analysis to extract actionable insights on users’ opinion and understand their needs before you start selling to them.
How your audience engages with your marketing message can help you determine your brand and brand message impact. Videos, DIY tutorials, product demos, user-generated content help drive engagement and turn prospects to customers when they begin to understand the value of your products(services).
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4. Data for Personalization
**Data is the new currency and data turned into information is a gold mine.**
Social media generates massive data with posts, check-ins, videos, pictures, memes, shares, comments, feedback, quizzes, polls, mentions, hashtags, and much more.
You can leverage this data to glean insights that can inform your social customer acquisition campaign strategies. Location-based data and data about prospects’ (and customers’) likes can help you craft a personalized message to woo them and address their needs in real-time.
5. Customer Service
A happy customer is your best brand advocate. Most brands are now leveraging social media to provide exceptional customer service to their customers. Most customers today take their grievances to social media and expect a quick resolution.
Although most businesses fear customer complaints as negative publicity, these situations can be turned into opportunities. You can use social media to highlight how valued your customers are. Your interactions and prompt customer support on social media will help build trust in your existing customers, who in turn, will become your brand ambassadors.
Moreover, your prospects in the social circle of your existing customers will take notice of your services and it will boost their interest in your brand.
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6. Create Shopping Opportunities
Many social media platforms such as Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram can capture moments that drive conversions by allowing users (customers) to shop (check-out) with minimal clicks.
For instance, Pinterest has a Conversion Optimization campaign type that can help you set campaign goals, inspire user actions, drive conversions, and acquire more customers.
You can add a shop section to your Facebook or Instagram page and tag your products in your Facebook posts. Whenever users click on these products (tags) they will be directed to the product page for easy purchase.
7. Measure and Manage
Most social platforms offer paid social campaigns to boost content reach, shares, comments, and likes. They also allow you to set targets of your campaigns and help you tweak your campaigns based on performance. You can also use social media tools to automate your post schedules, monitor user engagement and social acquisitions all from a centralized portal, making your customer acquisition activities more productive.
Learn More:
Top 10 Ways to Use Social Media for Business to Boost Sales in 2020
Customer Acquisition Strategy Takeaways
A social media customer acquisition strategy is a must when today’s customers are going digital and social. A precise and effective customer acquisition strategy on social media includes:
- Identifying your target audience
- Finding the right platform to promote your brand
- Actively listening and interacting with your audience
- Leveraging user data to personalize messages
- Resolving existing customer issues
- Creating shopping opportunities
- Measuring and adjusting your customer acquisition campaigns based on performance
How is social media helping your customer acquisition strategy? Tell us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook; we’re always listening!
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